utorak, lipnja 16, 2015

Environmental Risk Surface

Environmental Risk Surface is a module of the Protected Areas Tools developed by The Nature Conservancy, which is an extension for ArcMap. I've started using it for my thesis recently and so far so good! I was initially worried about taking on new software for something as important as my thesis, since I have no direct support to guide me, but for the moment I'm satisfied. The User's manual could use more detail, but I managed to get it to work.

The software lets the user spatially connect data on threats (human or natural) and conservation data. In my case, I am looking at geo-referenced human activities, such as garbage disposal, roads, urbanization, etc. After assigning an impact zone for each, relative intensity between all of them is determined and then input into the software. There are several option on the decay type of the impact and how individual impacts overlap, depending on expert opinion.

To make a long story short, this is a sample of the output of the program. Here I'm looking at roads, that have been divided into three categories - primary, secondary and paths on Santa Cruz island on Galapagos.



Each category has a different impact zone, based on its characteristics and expert opinion, which looks like this after the ERS has produced a raster based in the input:


The red zone that around the primary roads indicates strongest impact and it is also most far-reaching. Most roads are secondary so the prevailing colors are yellows and greens, indicating that their impact is smaller. The next image focuses on paths that have the smallest impact zone and intensity, so their buffers are comparatively small.


After obtaining similar rastes for all the human threats I'm considering, I will combine them in one layer, that can be overlain with areas that are important for conservation, thus indicating conservation-important areas that are being threatened by human activities.

The software is available at: http://maps.usm.edu/pat/

Nema komentara:

I may not have gone where I wanted to go, but I'm sure I ended up where I needed to be.